"Reactionary Renewal": “Judaism,” the “Jews,” and a Note on Peoplehood

Is Jewish Renewal Abandoning the Left, and If So, Why?

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One summer during one the Gaza wars I got a call from a friend who was attending a Jewish Renewal/Aleph retreat in the Pacific Northwest. They said to me, “We were sitting around at dinner and talking about the war. We were asking ourselves what we should think? And then we realized, Renewal doesn’t have a politics!”

I remembered that watching the shifts in the Jewish world today, when “having a politics” seems to have subsumed American Jews. In fact, it sometimes seems that it is all that matters. “Where do you stand?” On Gaza, the war, antisemitism, the “Jews.” Answers to those questions will determine what community you can belong to and who you can talk to. Renewed debates between socialism and liberalism, Israel and Diaspora, tribalism and universalism, protectionism and solidarity, fidelity or treason, Jew or “Un Jew.” It is truly a fascinating moment in that the very notion of Jews and Judaism seems to be in anxious transition.

A question that appears to me relevant in this moment is the dichotomy, distinction, and relationship between “Jew” and “Judaism.”

I want to frame this analysis by invoking an 1897 essay by Ahad Ha-Am (Asher Lev Ginsburg) entitled, “The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem.” Articulating his ongoing problem with political Zionism, Ahad ha-Am distinguishes between what he calls, “Western Zionism” and “Eastern Hibbat Tzion Zionism.” Western Zionism describes Herzl’s political state-centered project, and “Eastern” Zionism represents Ahad Ha-Am’s cultural Zionist project. While one can see both in tandem, for Ahad Ha-Am, the difference between them is paramount, constitutive, and in some way irreconcilable. It is not simply that one is state focused, or even political, and one is culturally focused or, according to Ahad Ha-Am, focused in the “moral problem” of the Jews.

More significantly, “Western Zionism” seeks to solve the problem of the Jews, and “Eastern Zionism” seeks to solve the problem of Judaism. Ahad Ha-Am writes, “The Eastern form of the moral trouble is absolutely different from the Western. In the West, it is the problem of the Jews, in the East the problem of Judaism.” (“The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem,” in Nationalism and Jewish Ethics, 76).

This speaks to something I often present in lectures on Modern Judaism. One seismic shift in Jewish modernity is between Jews and Judaism. Before emancipation, Jews and Judaism were somewhat fused, even for those who did not practice it. Judaism was the way Jews were largely defined by others as Jews, and the way they largely defined themselves as Jews. This is illustrated in an interesting way by Ivan Marcus in his book How the West Became Antisemitic: Jewish and the Formation of Europe, 800-1500 (2024). Marcus suggests a tripartite way Christian attitudes toward Jews in the Middle Ages contributed to the rise of antisemitism in modernity. First, the theological debates about who was chosen by God (what he calls the “inverted hierarchy”). Second, the Jew as the “enemy within” (largely after the First Crusade). And finally, the Jew (really, male Jew) as an “unchangeable and permanent condition, regardless of conversion.” It is really the last two that extend into modern antisemitism. The rise of secularism in enlightenment Europe produced the Jew without Judaism. According to Marcus, certain pre-modern elements of Christan attitudes toward Jews/Judaism contributed to what would become modern antisemitism, even as he was reluctant to draw the continuity as strongly as others.

Emancipation of the Jews in Europe over the course of the 19th century did not only allow Jews to become part of Europe, it also divided Jewish communal fidelity and severed the previous intimate connection between Jew and Judaism. Jews could be other than caretakers of Judaism. Spinoza might be the first modern Jew, albeit an idiosyncratic one. Spinoza never converted to Christianity but his Jewishness was no longer tied to the Jewish community, from which he was excommunicated, or Judaism in any formal way. The first modern Jew is the excommunicated Jew (On this, see Harry Austrin Wolfson’s short work From Philo to Spinoza). This continues into modernity with Isaac Deutscher’s The Non-Jewish Jew (a study of Jewish heretics) and then finally Gil Troy’s “Un-Jew,” the Jew who is “un-jewed” by not supporting the state of Israel.

This is why I agree with David Sorkin’s thesis that emancipation was the most significant thing to happen to Jews, maybe since the destruction in 70 CE. In a word, emancipation changed everything because in part it enabled the Jew to identify, or be identified, as a Jew, without Judaism. The ways in which this de-coupling contributed to modern antisemitism is another matter. And there were other challenges and responses to emancipation that produced Jewish modernity; citizenship, reformed worship, Orthodoxy, conversion, Zionism, are all byproducts of that radical change. Emancipation was the condition for all of them.

The severance of Jew from Judaism brought about by the emancipation does not imply an alienation from Judaism per se (sometimes it did)but opened new possibilities for Judaism resulting from the new positionality of the Jew. Are the Jews meant to be caretakers of an ancient wisdom tradition, or is that tradition a tool to keep “the Jews” intact (here see Adam, Sutcliffe’s evocative study What Are Jews For?: History, Peoplehood, and Purpose, 2025). The severance of Jews from Judaism was liberating for many Jews, and Jews who remained committed to Judaism developed it in new ways, from Reform to Hasidism, German Orthodoxy, Modern Orthodoxy, Reconstructionism, Religious Zionism. Without needed to be bound to an ecclesia, Jews forged their own path and created new and exciting alternatives. In this light, one can understand why there were many Jewish communities who were opposed to emancipation.

Jewish Renewal

One of the more recent byproducts of this shift is called Jewish Renewal. I have written about Renewal extensively elsewhere (see here). Here I simply want to assert that Jewish Renewal, constructed by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (1924-2014), is an amalgam of Hasidism cum neo-Hasidism through the prisms of Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Hillel Zeitlin, and combined with the American visions of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and Mordecai Kaplan. This is all refracted through New Age “Aquarianism” that swept America in the early 1970s.

Its politics, although thin, was largely the remnant of New Age politics; progressive, humanistic, global. Perhaps one of the earliest iterations of what would become Renewal, Havurat Shalom in Somerville, MA (Zalman was present at its founding), was established as a “seminary” in part to get draft deferments from Vietnam. Many of the radicals from the 60s who moved from what Arthur Waskow called “Jewish radical to radical Jew” in his 1971 book The Bush is Burning, took with them a political progressivism on matters of war, social policies, and later, gender. For example, Schachter-Shalomi quite early changed the name of his organization from Bnei Or ([masculine] “Children of Light” (likely a reference to Qumran – he would later title a chapter “Qumran USA” in his memoire) to P’nei Or, (Faces of Light).

Today it is hard to realize that Israel was not a central part of this new movement. But it wasn’t. The Jewish Catalogues (1972-76) which represented one of the first literary products of what would become Renewal, present highly “Orientalized” depictions of Israel, Jews dancing the hora on a kibbutz, Yemenite Jews smoking a Hukkah in the market, providing addresses and names of Hasidic rebbes to visit and receive a blessing. Little of that was nationalist. Or Zionistic (although I assume the authors of the Catalogues were Zionists). It was all very “spiritually” oriented. Palestinians existed only as background, as they did in much of Zionist discourse at that time. The occupation was new, Jews could hitchhike across Judea and Samaria with little fear. I know, I did.

As the politics became more complicated in subsequent decades, Renewal stayed solidly on the left although everyone more or less considered themselves Zionist in a loose kind of way. Kookean thinking (the romantic mystical messianism of Abraham Isaac Kook) was slowly making its way to America through translations, the settler movement was largely still viewed positively, as the pioneers of the coming end-time. The occupied lands were still considered “liberated” but not in any kind of overtly chauvinistic way (that would come with time). In short, in those halcyon days, history seemed to be on the side of Israel. And the Jews.

Until it got ugly. And it did get very ugly. The decades of occupation resulted in settlement expansions, then the First Intifada in 1989, then the second in 2000, then a series of wars that in some ways were the same war. And then October 7. And then the destruction of Gaza. By 1989 the occupied began to resist, as anyone with a historical perspective could have predicted. But Renewal didn’t really have a historical perspective. Romantics rarely do. It was supposed to be, after all, a “New Age.”

Settlements increased precipitously and the Greater Israel ideology of the late 1970s (Gush Emunim was founded in 1974) started becoming national policy. Renewal still held to a left or left-of-center position, many joining Peace Now (founded in 1978), some were earlier part of Breriah (1974) whose idea of two states was far too radical for mainstream American Jewry who rejected it. By 1976 (a year before Likud came to power), Breriah was gone. (See here).

Reb Zalman wasn’t a particularly articulate or astute political thinker and wrote very little about Israeli politics or Zionism. He did write an “Open Letter to Teddy Kollek,” then mayor of Jerusalem published in Paradigm Shift, where he called for Jerusalem to be declared an “international city” of the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This was not simply theoretical, nor should it have been surprising. Aside from being a rabbi, Zalman was ordained a universalist Sufi Sheikh of the order of Pir Vilayat. I remember, in the 1980s his coming to davenning on Shabbat on Moshav Modiim in his long green Sufi robe and belt. When he came to Jerusalem, one of the first places he would visit was Sufis in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City with whom he would say zikhr.

For the most part, Renewal was a spiritual and not a political project but in Jerusalem, and later in the Diaspora, politics took over the discourse. In some way, it “occupied Judaism.” Still, Zalman mostly kept his distance. As a survivor of DP camps during the Shoah he understood hatred and antisemitism, and as a participant of the New Age he understood the spirit as a salve for human pain and suffering. The thing I want to stress here, reaching back to Ahad Ha-Am’s distinction above, is that for Zalman, Renewal was a movement about Judaism, and not a way to solve the problem of Jews. It’s not that he didn’t care about Jews, he did, the same way Hibbat Tzion cared about Jews. But Renewal as well as Hibbat Tzion were, in different ways, about Judaism.

We are now almost 150 years from Hibbat Tzion and half a century from Renewal’s beginnings. Much has changed. Zionism and Israel have moved from the sidelines of Jewish identity in America to the center, even epicenter. Today, it is arguably becoming the litmus test of “Jewishness.” Much of that has become a kind of pro-Israelism which is less about Judaism and more about the Jews. Or perhaps better put, Jewish identity, as Elliot Cosgrove notes at the end of his book Such Time as This. Support for Israel has become identarianism and Judaism has become subsumed by it, and in it. This is part of what Yaacov Yadgar warns against in his book To Be a Jewish State: Zionism as the New Judaism (2024) that Israel has exercised a kind of “supersessionism,” not the disappearance of Judaism but its layered effacement (here). To be a “Jew” no longer requires belief, practice, or study. It requires fidelity to a nation-state and the front lines in the defense of the Jews. If not, you become an “Un Jew.”

This is certainly true for Orthodoxy, although Orthodoxy provides a textured and thick Jewish culture based on practice and belief that we don’t find in other Jewish communities. Its pro-Israelism may be intense, but it does not subsume halakha. One student at a screening of the film “Israelism” at Harvard said, “when I went to a Chabad summer camp we never talked about Israel.” I was a discussant on the panel. I replied, “Yes, because you had Judaism.”

Conservative Judaism and of late Reform through Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, have become full-throttle pro-Israel, or perhaps even “Israel first” (MIGA) institutions. Hirsch called for the Reform movement not to accept rabbinical students who are not Zionists (ironic given Reform’s beginnings). Even antisemitism has become Israel-centered. Seven of the 11 points that might constitute antisemitism in the IHRA document defining antisemitism are about Israel. To proclaim “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” makes the supersessionist point.

Today, intermarried Jews and their spouses have found a place in the Jewish community. Non-Orthodoxy, and to a lesser extent Orthodoxy, have adapted religious pluralism so successfully that how you practice Judaism or what you believe has become far less important today than in the past. What matters is where you stand on Israel. I don’t say this critically but descriptively. This seems to be where we have landed, especially after October 7.

A Note on Peoplehood

This is one of the great weaknesses of the ubiquitous term “Jewish peoplehood.” (I have written about this here). Jewish peoplehood was invented by Mordecai Kaplan (and Steven Wise) in the 1920s as a way for American Jews to identify with Zionism (there was no state) without being Jewish “nationalists” thereby avoiding accusations of dual loyalty (see Noam Pianko’s Jewish Peoplehood: An American Innovation here). Over time, it has been detached from that original purpose and become an umbrella term to define Jewish identity writ large. For our purposes here, what is significant is that it is essentially a marker of Jews without Judaism, the Jew as ethnos, which is why today it so easily becomes an expression of Jewish nationalism. In a way this feeds the contemporary move from Judaism to Jews that I am suggesting. Once Judaism is no longer a problem, in part because it has become, outside Orthodoxy, auxiliary to the Jew, peoplehood has found its moment. But as Ahad Ha-Am wrote in 1897, if Zionism seeks to solve the problem of the Jew, it will not do so without addressing Judaism.

Perhaps Martin Buber said this most succinctly when he wrote on his impressions of Ahad Ha-Am, “If Israel reduces Zion to ‘a Jewish community’ in Palestine it will not get the community. If it only wants to have a land like other lands, then the land will sink down under its feet just as the nation will melt away if it only wants to be a nation like other nations.” (Buber, On Zion, 145).

Peoplehood makes the Jew distinct from Judaism and in doing so, lends itself to the fusion of Jewish identity and Zionism (which is also, as a form of nationalism, an example of Jews without Judaism). It doesn’t solve the problem of the Jew. And it arguably creates more problems than it solves.

But what about Jewish Renewal?

Renewal doesn’t have a history like other Jewish movements. It is born from American spiritual progressivism, the romanticism of the New Age combined with the neo-Hasidism of the early 20th century. How has Renewal navigated this shift in American Jewry from Judaism to Jew? And why are we witnessing some of its spokespeople (by no means all) lean into an “Israel above all” turn in American Jewry in various ways that can easily be called “reactionary.”

I want to suggest two reasons for this reactionary, call it “nationalist,” turn. One external, and one internal. Externally, the shift in American Jews’ feelings about themselves as Jews, their safety, and their confidence in America, has become paramount in the wake of Gaza. In general, Jews in America today, even clergy and professional Jews, seem interested in “the Jews” more than they are interested in “Judaism.” I submit, American Jews’ Zionism today has become a form of what Ahad Ha-Am called “Western Zionism” that he was so critical about. His critique had two elements. First, without Judaism, the Jew and Jewish politics becomes an empty shell. And second, because the state will not solve the Jewish problem it seeks to address. This may be having an impact on the otherwise “Judaism-centric” (as opposed to “Judeo-centric”) Renewal ethos. There are many forces that want us to think “the Jews” are really in danger and not “Judaism.” Here we can compare Jabotinsky to Ahad Ha-Am. In today’s American landscape, we are increasingly siding with Jabotinsky.

Internally, we need to consider the ways in which a romanticism, often combined with a nostalgic sense of tribal-fidelity-spiritualism, can, given certain circumstances, shift from a reflexive feeling of openness and generosity to an insular sense of survivalism, and essentialist notions of the spirit. There is historical record of that phenomenon in various places, for example, Weimar Germany, pre-war Italy, and France. We see it in the Wellness Moms who support Trump, in the uber-capitalist “spirituality of money” phenomenon in Silicon Valley, in the micro-dosing billionaire class, and in places like the Aspen Institute.

One danger of romanticism historically is its inclination for essentializing, which can function expansively to maximize human evolution and flourishing and can sometimes turn in on itself and become a spiritual vehicle of survivalism and protectionism. For Zalman’s Renewal, the romanticism was about spiritual evolution in part because he viewed spirituality as a companion of humanism that was enlivened through a combination of world wisdom religions. It is no accident that he occupied a chair in “World Wisdom” at the Naropa Institute (now university). Renewal sought to redefine Judaism in a New Age of global humanism. I am arguing that we are watching this movement in a state of transition - from “Judaism” to “Jews.” And once the focus is an essentialized “people” and not a wisdom tradition, the romantic inclination easily slides into reactionary politics. This is not new; we’ve seen it before.

One of the byproducts of this turn in certain Renewal circles is that they can now more readily enter into the mainstream of American Jewry, where before they occupied a much more marginal space. I do not think those Renewalists move right are doing so to become part of the mainstream, I think they mean it. But joining the mainstream may be one of its advantages.

I see in this subtle turn a re-focus away from “Judaism” to “the Jews” a “Western Zionism” in Ahad Ha-Am’s eyes, a Zionism of survival and not a “Hibbat Tzion Zionism” of confronting the moral dilemma of Judaism and modernity.

Have American Jews become Obsessed with “Jews” and Increasingly Stopped Caring about Judaism?

As someone who has been part of the Jewish conversation for almost forty years, I find it interesting that if we look at the public Jewish conversation today, it has little or nothing to do with Judaism (Orthodoxy of course is different as it resides in its own halakhic orbit). I taught at JTS when the battle over admitting LGBTQ rabbis was at its height. It was sometimes painful. But it was about Judaism. I remember the battle about performing intermarriages, about intermarriage in general. These debates may still occupy attention in the seminaries, but they are far less apparent in the public square. What are Jews talking about, what are Jews fighting about today? Two things: Israel, and antisemitism. That is, “Jews” and post-Gaza politics, both of those are really interchangeable in many ways. Recall the New Yorker cartoon of a group of stick figures each with a bubble above them that says “Jews.” The caption of the cartoon is, “Jews.” “Jews” has really taken all the oxygen out of the Jewish room. It has sidelined Judaism (or, alternatively, it has replaced Judaism). And that is a problem.

Here my focus is Renewal. For Renewal to stand up to that sea change would require a deeply held conviction of the justness of its progressive cause. But it seems not to have that, perhaps because it never really had that. That was its New Age weakness. It was mostly a reflexive romantic progressivism that could easily be deployed in another direction.

But Jewish religious progressivism is emerging in other places. The new religiosity of the progressive Jewish Left, call it the “New Jewish Diaspora Left” (see here) that is now being denigrated by many, even some in Renewal, as the enemy of the Jewish people (that is, the “Jews”). This new progressivism does not reside in the Aquarian Age Judaism of Renewal but reaches back to a more politically charged Bundist/socialist past that has also now drawn from Renewal by adopting religious ritual and practice as an expression of a universalism that is not romantic but deeply ideological.

One difference of note is that Renewal began as a spiritual revolution that had not sufficiently worked out its politics (Arthur Waskow is the exception here, see here - remember it emerged in the aftermath, and fallout, of the political radicalism of the 1960s) whereas this new Jewish progressivism begins as a political intervention that is now adapting Judaism’s resources to express its politics. How this will develop remains to be seen.

American Jewry has been de-stabilized in various ways because of Gaza. As I have written elsewhere, there is Judaism before Gaza and Judaism after Gaza. The former we know (in its myriad forms) the latter is still embryonic. Here I suggest a transition whereby Zionism, or more accurately pro-Israelism, and antisemitism, a re-focus on the “Jews” as opposed to “Judaism,” has filtered into what is perhaps the latest re-envisioning of Judaism in 21st century America: Jewish Renewal. This romantic turn inwards, from the global to the tribal, should not surprise us. But for those of us who feel affiliated with that world, I think it should concern us.